Learning Journalism

Transcript

00:00:00.000That year they actually appointed a faculty member to help us. [Laughs] And this fellow was a neat guy who had been a newspaper man at some point in his career before he became a college professor, so we had an on-the-job training class in journalism.

00:00:25.643Journalism, what’s that? We’re so busy running the paper we don’t have time to learn journalism, [Laughs] you know. So he worked with us and we assigned reporters to beats.

00:00:41.495We each had a beat and we’d go try to drum up news. In the past it was just kind of take whatever press release you could get or whatever AP copy you could find or something and cobble together something to say.

00:00:57.903I would be probably the last guy there. It might be midnight or something and everything was set except the editorial, so then I had to–.

00:01:09.315You know, I can’t get to bed until I write an editorial so I need to think of something to talk about, and I go back and I look at some of the subjects, I don’t know where they came from. [Laughs]

00:01:23.891But we would complain about, oh, this walkway needs paving, or there are too many bricks here and we need less bricks, or they’re closing the traffic gates too early.

00:01:38.057I mean it was just ridiculous stuff. We didn’t think it was ridiculous but it was our little insulated world. We were in our own little world.